development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Stephen Downes <Stephen.Downes AT nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>]

Heather Ford wrote:

Thanks Stephen and David for your great comments on this.
> >
> > It is worthwhile to think of setting up an open system whereby Open Office
> > users are able to tap directly into (CC and equivalent licensed) RSS feeds
> > distributing free content. For example, a direct connection between
> > OpenOffice and Wikipedia would be most useful.

This sounds really interesting, Stephen - would love you to explain more
about how you think this could work/look. I've been thinking a lot about
how to make this connection more direct than just having a list of open
content on the cc website. I'd love to find a way of extending the
user-friendliness that CC is becoming well-known for, in developing this
side more - but I'm still trying to work out how it would look.

Obvously I don't have all the details worked out in my mind. But there
are two major aspects and an optional:

1. Treat the internet (or more specifically, the network of free
content repositories) as though they were a local file system
2. Create more mechanisms within the software itself to access that
file system
3. (Optional) Provide usage metadata back to the system

On the first point, the idea is that free learning (and other)
resources are available for access from within the OpenOffice software
in a manner analagous to the way that files are currently accessible.
Thus, the system would allow anybody to open such material straight
from the content repository into an OpenOffice application.

This would most likely be instantiated as a three step operation:
   - locate materials
   - view materials
   - select (all or part) of materials for use

The first part is key, since you can't simply browse hundreds of
thousands of resources the way you can browse your hard drive (you
can't even browse some hard drives any more, including mine). Thus, an
effective search mechanism would be required. Parts of the search
criteria would be specified automatically by the means of access (see
the second point). For example, if a user selected 'Insert an Image'
then the search would look for free images, not text documents. The
search should also try to draw on other environment variables. Knowing
the user's language or country of origin would also provide
preferences. If I were designing the search, I would allow the searcher
to select default content repositories so I could pick repositories
dedicated to a specific topic. For example, I would probably use
something like Edu_RSS to search for related articles. The idea here is
to treat the network of content repositories as a self-organizing
networks, as described in the last section of my paper, Resource
Profiles. http://www.downes.ca/files/resource_profiles.htm

The second part is a mechanism to preview items before inserting them
into your document. I don't know what to say about this, really.

The third part is the payoff. Once the user has reviewed the resource,
she selects either all or part of it. The resource is then copied
directly into the docuemnt in the appropriate format. For example,
suppose the user found a text on owls, and located a paragraph worth
quoting. She highlights the paragraph and then double-clicks (say). The
paragraph is then copied into the document, and a tag or caption is
placed into the document identifying the bibliographical information
and the creative commons (or equivalent) license information (this
latter is key for commercial users, who will not reuse content unless
they are certain, and can prove, that they have permission to use the
content).

On the second major point, we want to make access to these resources
integral to the application itself. It is worth noting in passing that
this is a service that should be provided by repositories (including
the ContentForge being discussed) into any application, not just
OpenOffice, though the authors of those applications would each need to
write code to provide access and use of the content.

In a program like OpenOffice, I would certainly include a function such
as this into an 'Insert' option. But more. I would also allow a user to
highlinght a word, double-click (say), and be shown a default set of
resources for that word, such as definitions, encyclopedia entires,
etc. Highlighting a person's name would yield a list of resources
authored by the person, or (switch a toggle) a list of resources about
that person. Certain keywords in the highlighted text would trigger
certain sorts of search results (the user wouldn't need to learn these,
the idea is that the system responds to what the user is asking for).
For example, 'graph' would tend to return graphs, 'map' would return
maps, 'flag' would return flags. Different repositories could handle
this in their own way.

On the third point, I would suggest that users be given the option to
report usage of materials back to the system, much like RSS trackback,
except that only metadata would be sent back (since the document does
not have a URL just yet). The usage metadata sent back captures the
context of use and helps describe the resource being used. This helps
the aggregator more accurately process search results for future
searches.

Now again, this sort of content distribution system should not be
restricted to open access. The same mechanism ContentForge uses to make
content available to OpenOffice should also be available to allow
people using Moodle to import (free) content into an online course. It
follows, therefore, that the sort of content that could be offered
through such a system could be something as simple as an image all the
way to something as complicated as an animation, simulation, or port
into an interactive environment.

-- Stephen